Being visually impaired, I have a keen interest in tools that help people use computers in their work and daily life. I've been fortunate that so far I've been able to cope with just a magnifier and using a large monitor and the tools built into Windows. But what about people doing data analysis and having to cope with screens of data, often in graphic or tabular form?
Nature has published an article about tools to help visually impaired or blind scientists do data analysis that I found quite interesting. While I don't need anything more complex than bar graphs for my household accounts, I'm glad to see that people are thinking about this problem.
An online tool called SciA11y, developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington, uses machine learning to extract the content and structure of a PDF (and other file formats, such as LaTeX) and re-render it in HTML, creating a table of contents containing links to tagged section headings that can be navigated with screen readers. AI2 has also built in functionality such as bidirectional navigation between in-line citations and their corresponding references in the bibliography, says Jonathan Bragg, who co-leads the project.
In a detailed survey3, six scientists with vision loss described how they frequently found themselves unable to access or read PDFs. One respondent mentioned that they encountered problems two-thirds of the time, and that they use at least six different approaches to read papers. “It was eye-opening to see the range of tools that people use when reading — and the struggles they have when those papers have not been formulated appropriately,” Bragg says.
No comments:
Post a Comment